Well I got to bed at 2am last night in the end, reasonably respectable as this kind of place goes! And I only got offered sex four times, not bad considering this is not even one of the sleazy districts really, and at very reasonable rates, because as one informed me, it’s the “low season” at the moment 🙂
In fact technically this is an exageration, they were only offering me massages really. But this was “…including everything, accomodation for the night as well. A happy finish guaranteed…” Maybe they were just very hospitable masseusses?
So apart from the local interest I toured a few bars and hooked up with the odd farang (tourist). The bars are mostly open air and very cosy, but also you can stop by one of the six thousand 7-11s that they have here and invest in a 640ml bottle of Beer Chang for 38 baht (75p) which at 6.4% does the job nicely. Armed with one of them and a punnet of pad thai from a vendor for 25 baht you can sit on a corner and watch the insane world going by in front of you.
I’ve moved hotels today, last night’s palace was lovely but at 2000 baht is not really a goer moving forward, so now I have a much more basic but still very comfortable place down the road for 580. This one also has BBC World so is quite useful for checking up on uprisings and ‘flu pandemics and other such nasties.. Today I’ve taken things fairly easy, just chilling out and reacclimatising to the temperature and the jet lag really, trested myself to a massage earlier (a genuine one this time without extras) which has made me a feel a whole lot better, especially what with the plane journey and so on. It’s amazing how quickly I’ve settled back into the groove, so to speak. Earlier, when I was doing some planning for the rest of this trip, I had to ask someone what day it was – I’d only been on the ground around 24 hours and had forrogtten already!
I’ve made a vague plan of action, namely to catch an overnight train tomorrow night down to Trang which is near the Andaman coast and getting down towards the Malaysian border, but still before the danger zone from what’s going on down there with the rebels, or so they tell me. Then I’ll head up the coast gradually from there, probably taking in place like Ko Phi Phi, Krabi and perhps Khoa Lak before ending up in Phuket where I can then fly back to Bangkok and go straight out again without needing to come back into the city.
So now it’s time to finalise that, so with no further ado, I hope you’re all enjoying your Monday mornings and I’m signing off to go to a bar!